That time Pat Dye let officials run ten secret minutes off the clock to put Kansas out of its misery

Coach Dye, Coach Dye—how long is it going to take you to beat Kansas? “50 minutes.”

In 1988, Pat Dye gave a whole new meaning to the hurry-up offense.

That was the year Kansas was so bad, and Auburn was so good—it was 42-0 at halftime—Pat Dye agreed to let the zebras sneak as many seconds off the second half as they felt they could get away with.

The mercy killing was perfectly legal.

According the AP writeup on the game, “(Referee Jimmy Harper) said he was asked by Kansas Coach Glenn Mason in the second half to ‘expedite’ the game, and then asked Auburn Coach Pat Dye if he would mind ‘if we moved the second half along.'” Dye said sure.

SEC Supervisor of Officials Bobby Gaston said that referees could “exercise common sense” by shortening the play of the game when “the losing coach surrenders and the winning coach is agreeable.”

How? By getting a little sloppy. The clock wouldn’t be stopped when the ball went out of bounds. It’d be stopped a couple of seconds after it went out of bounds, and it would start back not when the ball was snapped, but when the team broke the huddle. That sort of thing.

“I don’t know. It may have been something like that, I don’t really remember,” Dye told me when I asked about, among other things, Auburn’s hurry-up, hell-it-works offense. “But I remember the Kansas game. We didn’t want to beat them that bad.”

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I was at that game. Maybe I’ve been wrong all these years on the details, but I always remembered it as a timeout being called in the second half and the two coaches running out to midfield for a quick discussion; confusion resulting in the stands because no one knew what had just happened; and then the clock not stopping again the remainder of the game and the crowd gradually figuring out what had transpired.

A customer of mine attended Kansas during that time. He had a buddy that walked-on the football team. The guys comments after returning from Auburn were that:
1. Every part of him hurt after the game, and he didn’t play that much.
2. He was glad he didn’t have to play a team like that every week
3. He would never walk-on if he was at an SEC school.